Updating local and global probabilities during maze navigation.

Abstract

We examined the human ability to encode and utilize local and global uncertainty information during a navigational task. Participants were tasked with navigating a virtual maze in which wall locations were obscured. Local cues and a global direction provided guidance. The validities of the global and local cues were separately and jointly varied across the two experiments. The results demonstrated that participants effectively utilized both global and local cues for navigation with a stronger reliance on local cues and a heightened precision in estimating their reliability. Our findings suggest that the representation of uncertainty for proximate events can be dissociated from that of distal events. Furthermore, humans effectively integrate both forms of information when making decisions during navigation tasks. This research advances our understanding of uncertainty processing and its implications for decision making in complex environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).